This isn’t just a West Coast America phenomenon. China’s Tencent, a property company, is more extreme. It has little more than $1bn in fixed assets but a market value of $180bn. Office properties are, after all, both less glamorous and less expensive in Shenzhen than in Silicon Valley.
Tencent isn’t an office company. It has offices, obviously, but it’s not a property company.
Tencent’s many services include social network, web portals, e-commerce, and multiplayer online games.[4] Its offerings include the well-known (in China) instant messenger Tencent QQ and one of the largest web portals in China, QQ.com.[5] Mobile chat service WeChat has helped bolster Tencent’s continued expansion into smartphone services.
It is one of the largest Internet companies in the world. Tencent’s JD.com competes with Amazon, Google, Ebay, Facebook and Alibaba.
His underlying idea, that companies are now fixed asset light (or at least, some of them are) is true and interesting. His command of detail a little less so.
Its offerings include the well-known (in China) instant messenger Tencent QQ and one of the largest web portals in China, QQ.com.[5] Mobile chat service WeChat has helped bolster Tencent’s continued expansion into smartphone services.
So if this guy was not an idiot, he would notice that Tencent exists because it is protected from American competition. Tencent QQ and Wechat are Twitter by another name. They ripped it off. If the Chinese government allowed the Americans into China, I would guess the population would switch in an instant.
So that valuation rests entirely on lobbying the government and co-operating with China’s KGB
Wechat isn’t twitter. it’s actually quite a fun messaging app more like whatsapp, I use it a lot to communicate with friends and talk with my wife. It’s a bit of a mixture of messaging friends, video and voice calls, posting photos etc and this weird stalking thing where you can see users in the local area and randomly message them… although that part seems to have rather a lot of prostitutes on it.
QQ is an ICQ rip off mind. I read that the QQ code has the ICQ notes left in it where they blatantly copied it. Wechat though, I think was quite innovative, it’s been around for years now.
He should concentrate more on his cricket.
You can run pretty big companies on very little physical capital these days. Look at an airline: leased aircraft, rented offices, staff on zero-hours contracts and no pension scheme.
I’m with Jim. WTF has this to do with England’s leading test wicket taker?
You’ve been out of the country too long if you think any of us associate
James Anderson with anything orher than skillful swing bowling.
It’s surely a good thing that Jimmy has interests outside of cricket, and sensible too as he can’t carry on forever.
And interesting: this lack of attention to detail might explain the criminal over-use of the short ball earlier in the year.
Jack C, when did Jimmy (recently) overuse the short ball? Others maybe, but I’d say he has used it sensibly as an occasional shock tactic. He pitches it up, and swings it.
Are you another ex-pat showing your lack of connection to the UK? Jimmy is basically a god right now (though as you say, not immortal).